Martin Rodbell

Origins and early life

Martin Rodbell was born to a Jewish family in Baltimore on 1 December 1925, the son of Shirley Abrams and Milton Rodbell, a grocer. He entered Johns Hopkins in 1943 with a divided interest in biology and French existential literature, had his studies broken off by service as a US Navy radio operator, returned in 1946 and graduated in biology in 1949.

Work and career

In 1950 he married Barbara Ledermann, a Berlin-born Jewish refugee and a friend of Margot Frank, Anne Frank's elder sister; her own parents and sister were murdered at Auschwitz. He took a doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Washington in 1954 and joined the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda in 1956. Rodbell thought about the cell the way engineers were then beginning to think about computers: as a system with a discriminator that receives a signal from outside, a transducer that carries it across the membrane, and an amplifier that acts on it inside.

Testing that picture on liver membranes and the hormone glucagon over the turn of 1969 into 1970, he found that a trace of GTP could break the hormone's grip on the receptor a thousand times faster than ATP, and concluded that GTP was the true agent — the switch that turns an outside signal into an inside effect. The proteins it works through are now called G-proteins, and about a third of all drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration act on the receptors that speak to them.

Later years

He directed the NIH's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina from 1985, shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Alfred Gilman, and died in Chapel Hill on 7 December 1998.